GIS and Archaeology

Geographic (sometimes geographical or spatial) information systems (GIS) refer to hardware, software, and practices relating to the collection, management, and analysis of geospatial data. A large body of literature exists regarding archaeological GIS due to the discipline’s relatively early adoption in the 1980s. Archaeological uses of GIS relate to interests regarding the interdependence among geographic space, human culture, and various natural phenomena. GIS provides new forms of analyses that are either too difficult or even impossible without the aid of computers. Archaeologists’ interest in theoretical topics associated with interpretation and methodology continues to animate considerable discussion bringing archaeological GIS closer to GIScience, which moves beyond technical instruction to engage deeper conceptual aspects. Many of these aspects relate to particularly sections in this article. Early archaeological GIS interests focus on topics such as inventory, mapping inter- and intra-site distributions, and the prediction of new site locations. Today, archaeological GIS continues to explore these and emerging topics, such as the use of GIS to manage and interpret remotely sensed, visualization, and information science. The application of GIS remains one of the fastest growing areas of disciplinary specialization for archaeology and is central to cultural resources management work around the world. This bibliography groups archaeological GIS on the basis of use. This includes categories such as inventory, geospatial analyses, data visualization (e.g., mapmaking), and so forth. Some sections include subsections, as in the case of geospatial analysis where the literature continues to rapidly expand. Sources are placed into the most relevant section based on focus or best fit in relation to the overall literature on archaeological GIS.

Experimental Archaeology

Experimental archaeology is a multifaceted approach employed by a wide and rapidly expanding range of exponents including everybody from lab-based archaeological research scientists through to museum professionals and re-enactment groups. Scientific experiments are trials designed to test a hypothesis which will either be rejected (falsified) or validated. Validation does not imply truth, but demonstrates that the hypothesis is viable, though there may be equally viable alternatives. Experiments are the mainstay of almost all hypothetico-deductive science. Hence, one could define most archaeological science as being a form of experimental archaeology. However, most practitioners of experimental archaeology would view an attempt to replicate past activities and processes using authentic materials as an essential, defining aspect of the field. A laboratory scientist’s approach to experimentation is likely to minimize the variables being investigated at any one time while maximising control over conditions. Other experimental approaches, however, aim to see how processes work within life-like scenarios that involve authentic materials and variables. The term “actualistic” is often applied to such a mode of experimentation, alongside “reconstruction” and “replicative.” The best research often involves both controlled and actualistic experimentation to provide a sound understanding of individual variables and the interaction of many variables within realistic scenarios. These approaches are complementary and on a continuum. While some experimental archaeologists view their approach as an actualistic branch of hypothesis-based archaeological science, where the strict definitions of an experiment apply, others view the field as somewhat broader. Such practitioners value what can be learned from attempting to carry out activities, or even live, in conditions and with the materials that would be available in a particular time or place. This type of activity is often not based upon the testing of particular hypotheses but on experiential learning. Exponents of this approach will gain insights into the potential challenges faced by past peoples that might not otherwise occur to us or be reflected in the ethnographic record. Groups of practitioners that fall into this category might variously identify as being “re-enactors,” exponents of “living history,” “primitive technologists” or even “survivalists.” Thus, experimental archaeology can range from strictly scientific and objective methods to more subjective, experiential approaches, while retaining the essential aim of undertaking experiments which usually include actualistic activities using authentic materials. An additional noteworthy attribute of experimental archaeology is that re-enactment and reconstruction activities lend themselves particularly well to engaging forms of public presentation and education. As such, open-air experimental archaeology museums are currently expanding in number and visitorship. This field is expanding exponentially in almost every branch of archaeology making an individual section on every possible topic impossible, thus our approach is indicative and organized by broad themes of inquiry.

Animal Sanctuaries

Animal sanctuaries are human-created spaces for the protection and care of animals rescued from conditions of violence, exploitation, neglect, or abuse by other humans. The contemporary institution of the animal sanctuary originated with the first sanctuaries established in the United States by animal protection activists in the early 1980s. Since then, activists have established hundreds more throughout the world. Individual sanctuaries typically focus their efforts on specific kinds of animals corresponding to the ways in which they are used or commodified by humans, such as farmed animals, companion animals, or wild animals used in entertainment and biomedical research, although others may focus on a specific species of animal, such as chimpanzees, horses, wolves, or elephants. Animal sanctuaries are a novel subject of ethnographic inquiry in anthropology and related social sciences, so “sanctuary studies” is currently a nascent but growing topical area of research. Despite the relatively small body of literature focused on animal sanctuaries, anthropologists and other social scientists investigating sanctuaries and related endeavors, such as wildlife rehabilitation centers, have already provided valuable insights into why and how humans have chosen to care for rescued or endangered animals and the new kinds of institutions and political ecological relationships that are generated by these practices, highlighting the varied and, at times, conflicting ideas about care, ethics, value, species difference, and animal subjectivity and agency that inform sanctuary work. This pioneering literature forms a rich foundation for future research.

Environmental Justice and Indigeneity

Indigenous environmental justice (IEJ) is distinct from the broader EJ field, which has been found to exhibit certain limitations when applied to Indigenous contexts. Indigenous scholars have observed, for example, that EJ scholarship generally does not consider Indigenous sovereignty, laws, and governance. Attempts to ensure the relevance and applicability of EJ to Indigenous contexts and realities have resulted in what can be thought of as an “Indigenizing” of the EJ scholarship. Recent scholarship thus recognizes that Indigenous peoples occupy a unique position in terms of historical, political, and legal context, and that this requires specific recognition of their goals and aspirations, such as those outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN General Assembly [UNGA] 2007). Achieving IEJ will require more than simply incorporating Indigenous perspectives into existing EJ theoretical and methodological frameworks, as valuable as these are for diagnosing injustice. IEJ offers a theoretical and analytical framework that goes beyond “Indigenizing” and “decolonizing” existing EJ scholarship and extends to frameworks informed by Indigenous intellectual traditions, knowledge systems, and laws. Indigenous nations and societies are diverse and no single IEJ framework will serve all contexts and situations. There are, however, commonalities among suggested frameworks as evidenced through various international environmental declarations prepared by Indigenous peoples over the past three decades that convey key concepts relating to IEJ. First, Indigenous knowledge systems should be utilized as a theoretical framework for analysis. In this frame, justice applies to all “relatives” in Creation, not just people. EJ is not just about rights to a safe environment, but it includes the duties and responsibilities of people to all beings and, conversely, their responsibilities to people. IEJ is regarded as a question of balance and harmony, of reciprocity and respect, among all beings in Creation; not just between humans, but among all “relatives,” as LaDuke 1999 and Kanngieser and Todd 2020 show. Second, Indigenous legal traditions should form the basis for achieving justice. Scholars have noted how Western legal systems continue to fail Indigenous peoples and the environment. In this sense, grounding conceptions of justice and injustice in Indigenous intellectual and legal traditions opens up possibilities for achieving justice. Finally, IEJ must acknowledge the historical and ongoing role colonialism has played in perpetuating injustices.

Graphic Anthropology

Graphic anthropology, broadly construed, approaches drawing as a mode of anthropological inquiry. Most commonly, drawing and sketching have been employed by cultural anthropologists as visual research methods during fieldwork. This practice, which can include sketching fieldnotes and inviting research interlocutors to create or respond to drawings, has developed as a way to document the process of coming-to-know during research and to visually explore the different perspectives at play in an ethnographic encounter. In archaeology, technical drawings, field drawings, and the analysis of drawings from the archaeological record have been central to the research process. In recent years, anthropologists across the sub-disciplines have begun to more actively explore the conceptual and critical potentials of drawing as a process (to draw) and product (a drawing) that is open-ended, multidimensional, and attuned to bodily practice. The creation and analysis of graphic arts in anthropology has fostered cross-disciplinary affinities and overlaps with medical and digital humanities, public health, visual culture studies, and the visual and literary arts. Of particular interest to many cultural and medical anthropologists is the genre of comics, as its unique blend of text and image arranged in sequence allows for the layering of different times, spaces, bodies, and perspectives within a single page in non-linear and non-hierarchical ways. While comics have long been a tool in public health campaigns, the early 2000s saw the growth of the field of “graphic medicine,” which explores how comics about illness and healing can provide unique insights into the cultural, personal, embodied, and epistemological contexts of medicine. Similarly, the fields of anthropology, literature, and visual studies have recently witnessed renewed interest in the social and aesthetic dimensions of drawings and there has been an upsurge in the creation of comics, zines, and graphic novels as major research outputs across academic disciplines and anthropological sub-disciplines. Graphic anthropology can also be situated in relation to the subfield of multimodal anthropology, which expands the domain of visual anthropology beyond its historical focus on film and photography to include engagement across multiple media technologies, platforms, producers, and publics. While graphic anthropology is connected to visual anthropology, the strong interdisciplinary articulations of drawing as a mode of research, practice, and creation combined with a focus on comics as site of cultural production mark the “graphic” as a rich domain of anthropological inquiry in its own right.

Niche Construction

Niche construction is a concept that originated in evolutionary biology. It challenges the assumption that ecological niches are empty, pre-existing environmental spaces into which passive organisms must be fitted through adaptive natural selection. Niche construction theory argues that organisms construct their own niches when they actively select features of their current environment on which to rely, thereby influencing the selection pressures they encounter. Niche construction was developed after 1975, during a period when sociobiology had gained popularity among evolutionary theorists, with claims that all features of organisms, from anatomy to social behavior, could be explained in terms of natural selection on genes. Organisms, indeed, were disappearing as agents in evolutionary narratives. By the mid-1980s, however, sociobiological narratives were facing challenges. Perhaps the most successful were mounted by evolutionary theorists who borrowed mathematical models from population biology and used them to explore how Darwinian selection might operate on units of culture as well as on genes. During this period, the original writings on niche construction were also re-examined, and ways were sought to model the process mathematically. These efforts led to the publication in 2003 of the landmark text Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution, by John Odling-Smee, Kevin Laland, and Marcus Feldman. This volume has since become widely influential, not only among theorists of biological and cultural evolution but also among scholars in fields such as ecology and developmental biology, as well as in the human sciences. In anthropology, archaeologists and biological anthropologists in particular have found niche construction theoretically helpful for explaining such phenomena as our ancestors’ ability to outlast other hominin species in the Pleistocene, our success in domesticating plants and animals after ten thousand years ago, and our dramatic remaking of global landscapes and species distributions in what has been called the Anthropocene. As a result, work on niche construction is coming to intersect in provocative ways across the subfields of anthropology with work by sociocultural anthropologists interested in areas such as environmental anthropology, material culture, and multispecies ethnography.

Mental Health and Illness

Anthropological contributions to the study of mental health and illness span diverse literatures and track a wide field of intellectual traditions and debates in their approaches to mental disorder, treatment, and recovery. Much as can be said of anthropology as a discipline more generally, the long history of the anthropological study of mental illness in cross-cultural context has been entwined in large-scale historical processes, including colonialism, racism, migration, war, and globalization. This history has also been shaped by the dynamic dialogue between anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, and global public health, and from which a number of subfields and intellectual traditions have emerged, among them ethnopsychiatry, cultural psychiatry, social psychiatry, and, most recently, global mental health. While certain core themes in the anthropological study of mental disorder that extend back to the early days of anthropology persist today, others have newly emerged in response to contemporary conditions. Collectively, these core themes recognize how mental illness experiences are richly variable and cultural in nature, and that psychiatric diagnosis is itself contingent, involving styles of reasoning and ways of knowing that are culturally informed and shaped by institutional landscapes and translational processes. These core themes include questions regarding psychiatric taxonomy and whether the classification of mental health problems is universal or culturally relative; the structural sources of human distress and suffering; treatment systems and interventions, such as the role of institutions and therapies in shaping the social course and experience of mental illness; the phenomenology of living with mental disorder; and the forms of psychiatric knowledge and practice enacted in contexts ranging from addiction treatment clinics to humanitarian settings. Studies span a wide range of engagement, from cultural critique to intervention studies that position anthropologists as collaborators in the development of effective and accessible interventions. Many studies draw on anthropology’s classic traditions of ethnography and long-term fieldwork, while raising questions and propositions for the relevance of anthropological methods and theories in the face of new ontologies of mental disorder, emergent technological frontiers, changing political and economic contexts, and the global aspirations of mental health treatment. In their complexity, mental health and illness speak to fundamental questions concerning the nature of human experience in changing worlds, making the topic deeply relevant for anthropology.

Reproductive and Maternal Health in Anthropology

In anthropology, the subject of maternal health is diffused within the broader areas of the anthropology of reproduction, fertility, and reproductive health. As a topic it is constituted by work at the intersections of anthropology, public health, feminist studies (covering topics on reproductive choice and autonomy, for instance), and development studies (with its focus on the issues of maternal and infant mortality). The citations presented here are grouped into six topic categories as linked to maternal health, each with further subtopics, on childbirth and maternal/reproductive health, fertility and infertility in maternal health, reproductive technologies and maternal health, family planning and maternal health, abortion, and maternal-health policy and human rights. The topics have been selected on the basis of historical work in these areas and in terms of new directions presented by more-recent work. Wherever possible, indigenous anthropological expertise stemming from local authors in the topic areas has been included.

Ethnographic Films from Iran

Iranian ethnographic films began with a focus on preserving Iran’s diverse traditions and indigenous cultures. Many of these films were salvage documentaries marked by nostalgia for disappearing traditions of rural and tribal life. The earliest film from this tradition is Grass (1924), which is about tribal migration and was made by American explorers before ethnographic films were recognized as a tradition. The impetus to preserve rural and tribal cultures first came from a group of filmmakers who were trained by a team of specialists from United States Information Service’s (USIS) film program and a team of filmmakers from Syracuse University, who came to Iran in the late 1940s and 1950s to help with development and modernization. They made propaganda and educational films that promoted industrialization, health, agriculture, and education in remote regions of Iran. They also trained Iranian filmmakers who later made actuality films, some of which could be considered ethnographic, with support from state institutions such as the Ministry of Culture and Art and National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT). The notion of what constitutes ethnographic film has been debated by scholars and filmmakers since ethnographic film was first conceived. Ethnographic film has occupied a marginal space in the academic discipline of anthropology because many films that are considered ethnographic lack rigorous scientific research and are not made by anthropologists. Many of the films discussed here are documentaries that provide detailed documentation of daily life and customs of Iranian people but most are not films made by ethnographers. Meaningful university support for the production of academic ethnographic films was rarely available in Iran, except during the leadership of Nader Afshar Naderi at Tehran University’s Social Sciences division in the early 1960s. He introduced ethnographic film to Iranian academia and made several films with detailed attention to customs and traditions of Iranian tribes. Besides films about tribes and Iran’s cultural traditions that have continued into the present day, since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, films of ethnographic value have been made about the Iran-Iraq War and more recently about urban life. Filmmakers documented the eight-year war in a long-running television series that observed soldiers on the front lines. Finally, since the early 2000s, some independent filmmakers have made films that focus on city life, particularly documenting lives of young Iranians, or have made personal and autobiographical films by turning the camera on their own lives.

Global Archaeology

Global archaeology is the archaeology of globalization, documenting and unearthing the material markers of its origins, trajectories, manifestations, and repercussions. In the 1980s, when globalization first developed as a major force, there was a sense of excitement, along with some foreboding. Closely connected to ideals of democracy, individualism, capitalism, and free markets, globalization promised to break down barriers between people in different parts of the world, open borders, improve communications, and create new opportunities. Enhanced understandings and greater world peace seemed an inevitable outcome. However, in the early 21st century, it is clear that the world is undergoing profound environmental, economic, and social transformations, and that many of these changes are problematic. Globalization has exacerbated old stresses and dislocations and created new issues of serious concern. Inequality continues to grow, both within and between countries. Racism, discrimination, and exclusion are hot issues, as are nationalist backlashes against migrants. The lifestyles of people in First World countries are prompting changes in climate that may actually drown some Pacific nations. Archaeology functions as a tool for analyzing the material correlates of the shifts and schisms wrought by globalization. Descending from various strands of archaeological research that seek in one way or another to promote a better potential future, calls for a more “present- and future-oriented archaeology” (Harrison 2011, p. 144) have come from a variety of sub-disciplinary directions, including contemporary archaeology, Indigenous archaeology, and historical archaeology. Archaeologists can record sites on islands that may soon vanish due to climate change. They can identify the manner in which material inequities visually communicate and reinforce economic inequalities. They can identify disconnections and dislocations and provide new insights into social change as it takes place. They can highlight injustices that are normalized by contemporary values and, through this, provide impetus for a different future. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on those branches of archaeology that address the impact of globalization. The topics range from climate change and colonialism to forced migration and the influence of information and communication technologies. Underlying them all are issues of inequality, social justice, ethics, and human rights. Some publications focus on the “big picture” changes that have been wrought by globalization, while others provide in-depth local case studies. All are joined by a common perspective that values the assessment of local conditions in terms of how they are shaped by global circumstances.